Google Yourself
Don’t Google yourself. Why? Because you may not like what you find… One day, I was bored and decided to search for my own name on Google. I have quite a rare name, so I didn’t expect to find many results. Imagine how surprised I was when I came across a website that had my full name in the domain. www.(my name).com When I clicked the link, it brought me to a message board. I looked at the profile of the website owner and found out that the person was the same age as me and had the same hobbies and interests. There weren’t any posts on the message board, but I was intrigued, so I saved it in my favorites. It was about a month later, when I went back to the website. This time, it had more content. There were some diary entries, mostly random things like “The weather was nice today” or “I’m so bored in work”. Things of that nature. However, as time went on, I began to notice more and more coincidences. The person lived in the same city as I did. It struck me as rather strange that two people with the exact same rare name would be living in the same city at the same time. At one point, I noticed that the contents of the diary were quite similar to my own life. One day, I went to a baseball game and when I checked the website that evening, I found that the owner of the site had gone to the same ball game. At first, I didn’t think much of it. After all, tens of thousands of people in the city supported the same baseball team. It began to seem like much more than a simple coincidence. Whenever I checked the website, I would notice little biographical details that seemed too close for comfort. For example, the owner mentioned their pet dog and the dog’s name was the same as the dog I had when I was a child. The website owner posted a picture of their car. It was the same model of car I had been driving when I was in college. They talked about eating at a certain restaurant. It was the same restaurant I had gone to all the time when I was working at my previous job. One day, when I looked at the message board, people had written messages to the owner saying “Happy Birthday!” That day, it was my birthday as well. I decided to write on the message board for the first time, just out of curiosity. I was going to wish the owner a happy birthday and tell them we had the same name. However, when I tried to write something, I realized that there was nowhere to type your message. It wasn’t a message board at all, just a static page. “That’s odd”, I thought to myself. In other words, whoever owned the website had gone to a lot of trouble to make it seem as if it was an interactive site… as if there were other people posting on it… when in actual fact, all the content must have been created by the owner. “Why on earth would someone do that?” I wondered. I decided to send an e-mail to the owner. It read: “Hi there. Believe it or not, we both share the same name. Nice to meet you!” It was just a friendly e-mail. The next day, when I tried to look at the website, I discovered that it was gone. It seemed like it had been deleted. Then, I opened my mailbox. There was one reply. When I looked at it, a chill ran down my spine. It just read: “Found You!”